One of our ducks has started dropping eggs in random locations in the garden. I don’t know which duck, but I assume it’s one of the new females we took in from the SPCA, who hasn’t figured out “nesting” yet. I do love ’em but they’re not African Grey’s in the IQ department. Anyhow, I think I finally understand why people hide eggs in the garden at Easter. Because ducks used to do it for them! I suppose, for millennia, this has been the season to go hunting for eggs. Now we just substitute chocolate ones instead.

For the moment, I’ve kept them in a cool shady spot while I keep an eye out for an actual nest. If a polecat doesn’t find them first, I may be able to slip them onto the nest in time for them to get hatched along with some cousins.

This entry was posted
on Monday, March 19th, 2012 at 11:16 am and is filed under play.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the
RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I find ducks to be very endearing (and baby ducks to make me melt). I’ve enjoyed watching a small family of ducklings slowly grow into teenagers with funky hairdos and pushy attitudes. They’re very sweet animals.

OFF TOPIC
A few months ago a list of the most downloaded paid apps was published, and the developer of one of the top apps in the list posted the exact number of downloads his app received. It was no more than a few hundred downloads. What are you going to do to get more apps into the Software Center, and what will you do to increase the number of purchases? By now I was expecting to see hundreds of paid apps each getting thousands of purchases, not the current measly numbers.

Will you please get the Software Center better organized, with a separate section for electronic publications, and a sub-section for each series (such as one subsection per magazine, with one entry per issue), remove free apps that were added through the MyApp portal from the paid apps section, and have the demos and trial version placed inside the page for the full version instead of giving them their own page.

Heard of ‘cat’ people ‘dog’ people, these ‘duck’ people a new breed 🙂 Do members of your brood have names? Might I suggest ‘alpha’ & ‘omega’ or ‘quacky 1 & 2’ for short 🙂 Well if you can’t call them by name, how are they going to know who you are talking to……? 🙂

Well, they stay cool while they are being laid, one by one, over a period of some days. Mama only starts sitting on them when they are all laid, so they all start to develop at the same time, and thus hatch at the same time. Ain’t nature grand 🙂 Anyhow, sad to say the eggs disappeared before the incubator arrived. That’s the other side of nature.

Congrats! I am a new ubuntu user. I tried out 11.10 as a dual boot with windows7, and after 5 days I decided to stick just with ubuntu, and I formatted my hard drive. Also Unity, that has been so controversial looks great, and by the look of 12.04 beta it has just started its development.

Then I found out about something. You see, after having such an amazing experience with Ubuntu, and Linux in general, I decided to buy a new laptop without Windows 7 to replace my old one, if not with Ubuntu preinstalled, just with no OS. You can imagine the result. It’s near to impossible to buy a good laptop or desktop without windows. I checked out the ones in system76, and although they are good they are very expensive and not visually appealing. And besides, if you are looking for something specific, like gamer stuff you can forget about it. Anyhow, I was amazed at this lack of support for linux, and I did a bit of research. It seems that things are slowly moving forward here in Europe, but still, one has to make complaints, and sometimes customers even start legal procedures against Microsoft, with various grades of success. In fact, the first such case in my country, Spain, ended up with the judge declaring that hardware and OS are indivisible, and declaring that this poor Linux user had to pay the already so called “Microsoft tax” plus the costs of the trial.

Now this seems completely unfair doesn’t it? As a new user I am not very much aware of what your company is doing currently or if you are making advances in that area, but I need to ask you about it: are you? Is Canonical ever going to start a hardware line? I don’t mean this as to restrict ubuntu to just your products, but as a support service we, your faithful users need. Especially if things, as is said on lots of sites get even more difficult for linux after the release of windows8.

It looks like the comunity is also very eager to get their hands on ubuntu’s own hardware:

Mark, why is Canonical hiding the identity of the egg-laying duck? Can you provide me with a link to the thread in which you first announced your claim that an anonymous egg had been laid? This would never happen at RedHat, they always know both the identity of the egg-laying duck and more importantly, how to sell the egg. Canonical on the other hand..I’m trying to be as charitable as I can be here….has no clue as to what people are willing to pay for eggs.

And another thing, next time you want to post such off-topic stuff have the decency to consult me first. I mean, for whose benefit is markshuttleworth.com run, yours or mine?